1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a driving data recording device or a trip recorder for a motor vehicle and includes a device for collecting time- and/or speed-dependent driving data, which is mounted directly on or in the drive gear housing shell.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Such apparatuses, generally called tachographs, with electronic data recording are disclosed in European Patents EP-O 188 429-B1 and EP-O 191 413 B1. On the other hand, such tachographs are modified further for recording the driving data directly on the speed-time chart.
Tachographs are primarily used, because of existing legal requirements in trucks and serve for storing data, which characterize the transport performance in a way that enables a simple and reliable reconstruction of the driving or travel course by drivers, vehicle owners and authorized monitoring bodies.
These apparatuses permitted to eliminate log books and, because of this, are required to record, to the same extent, vehicle data for times of a day, i.e., speeds, covered distance, stationary periods and, if necessary, other vehicle data.
Through the tachographs with time-speed charts proved themselves in practice and despite of the use of electronic storage cards and storage cassettes as driving data memory, because of a particular competition situation in the transportation industry, attempts to manipulate the tachographs or their data carriers in a fraudulent way should be taken into account. Securing of these apparatuses against obvious manipulative attempts is possible with additional expenses. The manufacturing and mounting of such apparatuses are unavoidably accompanied by additional costs, and an absolute security against manipulation can be achieved only with prohibitively high expenses.
The manipulation problems such as, e.g., producing the obligation of the driver, written data carriers, such as trip documents one or several days before, are discussed in detail in the already mentioned prior art and, for the sake of shortening the description, need not be repeated here again.
Accordingly, an object of the invention is a trip recorder having a substantially improved security against deliberate attempts to manipulate the data collection or to alter them and which can be produced substantially more economically than the known tachographs.